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The Secret Life of Canada: Season 6, Episode 12: Was the plot to assassinate Lincoln hatched in Canada?

Hosts: Leah-Simone Bowen and Falen Johnson

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

LEAH SIMONE-BOWEN: So if you're not following us, why is that? Come on, people, it's free. It's a low stress kindness you can do for yourself and us. Get your history on, hit subscribe, follow and like where you listen. Okay, let's start the show. It's 1865 and the American Civil War is over. The Northern Union Army won over the Confederate South. The southern states would no longer be able to enslave black people. And Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy, is captured and imprisoned for over two years at Fort Monroe in Virginia. By the time he's released, he and his family have lost their land, money, status, and most of all, the free labor. So he needs a new plan. He needs to find the one place that would embrace him, his family and their southern Confederate values. And so he heads... To Montreal, Quebec.

FALEN JOHNSON: This is the Secret Life of Canada. A podcast about the country you know, and the stories you don't.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Hey, Falen.

FALEN JOHNSON: Hey, Leah. So, the civil war.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I know, I'm not going to make you join a Civil War reenactment club. There will be no costumes in this one, but.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. I mean, that's good, because muskets are expensive. Although I do think I would look fetching with mutton chops.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I agree. That's something to explore for sure, and...

FALEN JOHNSON: Absolutely.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: But I wanted to look into this particular story because it's very wild.

SOUNDCLIP

DR. AFUA COOPER: History is complex because it's so multi-layered. It's never one thing. It's never one answer.

REPORTER: This is Doctor Afua Cooper. She's a historian, former poet laureate of Halifax and author of the very good book The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Slavery in Canada and the Burning of Old Montreal.

DR. AFUA COOPER: So we're thinking of Canada as its haven, the North Star, the refuge for black people from the United States. That's one piece of the story. The other piece of the story is around the same time, you had Canada as a refuge to Confederate spies, Confederate gentlemen and ladies and their families. And in a more ominous way, I mean, Lincoln was assassinated, Lincoln was murdered, the president of the United States. And the plot to murder him was hatched in Montreal, Canada. I mean, it sounds like a movie, but it's real. It's true.

FALEN JOHNSON: It does sound like a movie. Okay, so the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln happened in Montreal?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Weirdly, yes it did.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay, I need to know more about this. I mean, like, how did this happen? The Civil War is an American story, and I kind of don't understand how Canada factored into it.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Well, it's complicated, just like the Civil War itself.

FALEN JOHNSON: Yeah, and we don't have time to go into too much depth here. But could you explain it to us? Like, I feel like I need a primer to understand all of this. Do you think you can explain the Civil War in under one minute? We haven't done this in a while. We used to do this all the time...

[cross-talk]

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah, we used to do this.

FALEN JOHNSON: I feel like. So let's. Let's...

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Okay.

FALEN JOHNSON: See if we still have the scale.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Okay, let me see if I still...I still got it. Okay. You got the...

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay.

FALEN JOHNSON: Let me hold on one second.

LEAH SIMONE-BOWEN: OK.

FALEN JOHNSON: And. Go.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: The American Civil War was a battle between all of the states. It happened over four years, from 1861 to 1865. The fight boiled down to a war between the northern U.S. government and 11 southern states that wanted to leave the Union. Most people describe it as a battle between north and South. What were they fighting over? Slavery. Ten years before the war started in the 1850s, the movement to end slavery was growing stronger when Abraham Lincoln, who was against slavery, was elected president in 1860. Swallowing the southern states, decided to leave the Union to try and keep their right to own enslaved black people. They formed the Confederate States of America with a guy named Jefferson Davis as their leader. But the northern states, led by the legitimately elected Lincoln, had a bigger population. They had more factories and railroads than the South. A lot of battles happened over the four years, and in the middle of it all, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which stated that all persons held as slaves are, henceforth, shall be free. Eventually, the war ended in 1865 when the top general of the Confederacy, the bad guy, surrendered. It's estimated about 2% of the entire U.S. population died during the war. The South was left in ruins. The Union was saved, but and slavery ended. But guess what? White supremacy and southern sentiments didn't just dissolve away that easily. And five days after the war ended, Lincoln was assassinated while watching a play. Too bad for theater. His murderer, an actor named John Wilkes Booth, shot him at close range in the head. It ended the life of a man that many credit as being one of the greatest American presidents of all time.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay, that was one minute and 30 seconds. But I'm going to but I'm going to say that was really good, that was still really good.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Thank you, thank you.

FALEN JOHNSON: And I just want to say listeners, that was one take.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: That was one. I did it on a one.

FALEN JOHNSON: That was one take.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Thank you. See, and this is why theater is important. Yes, you can get murdered in a theater, but if you have theater training and breath control, you can also summarize things very quickly. Yeah.

FALEN JOHNSON: And this episode sponsored by theater school. Okay. Okay. So out of this, out of all of this, so we the South is bad, the north is good. And now let's hear how Canada ended up being a great place for Southerners.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Okay, so let's start at the beginning. We got to go about ten years before the Civil War took place.

SOUNDCLIP

DR. AFUA COOPER: The year 1850 is critical. As I've said in the United States Congress in 1850, they passed the Fugitive Slave Act, and what that meant was the American Congress empowered slaveholders to track down the runaway slaves wherever they were. If they were in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, tracked them down, get them arrested by federal marshals, and return them to slavery. This was a new game. Thousands of people who had escaped slavery previously and were living in the state, in the northern states and Midwest, now had to go farther north. They had to come into Canada.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: So, this was a turning point in both the U.S. and Canada. It made Canada the only place African-Americans could come to ensure their safety. And it also meant that previously safe states carried the constant danger of recapture, or hell, not even recapture. You could just be captured if you were free. Random bounty hunters were taking free black people to the south and selling them into slavery.

FALEN JOHNSON: You know, and I assume this law also increased the tension between the states.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Oh, yeah, it did. And then cut to ten years later, Lincoln wins the presidency. And he goes from being kind of lukewarm on slavery, to be honest, to full out anti-slavery, which you think would have been applauded here, but it wasn't the case. I reached out to Julian. Sher. He's an award-winning investigative journalist and the author of The North Star: Canada and the Civil War Plots Against Lincoln. It's an amazing book. I highly recommend reading it if you want to know more about the subject. And, I just needed to know more about Canadians' response to Lincoln. And he told me all about it.

JULIAN SHER: Obviously in 1860s there was no radio, no internet, no television. The only way people got information was by the newspapers. The newspapers back then were much more ideological. They were owned in Canada by rich businessmen, of course, who were almost always tied to political parties, didn't hide their political allegiances. And what's remarkable, except for The Globe, which was run by George Brown, who was a staunch abolitionist, and one newspaper in Montreal, almost all the newspapers denounced Lincoln consistently. The Emancipation Proclamation comes out, right? 1863. The freeing of the slaves. If you and I were sitting in Montreal reading the Gazette, the Montreal Gazette, they denounced that proclamation. I'll quote it. They said the proclamation will be little more than an indecent exposure of Lincoln's rage and being dismissed. An Ontario newspaper, The Niagara Review, called Lincoln a man blood-stained desk plot in Washington. If you were growing up in Canada at the time, that's what you would have believed because that was the newspaper you read.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay, so I'm I'm kind of surprised by this. Why were all these Canadian newspapers hating on Lincoln so hard?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I had the same question.

JULIAN SHER: Because when the Civil War breaks out, it's 1861, and Abraham Lincoln and I think many people in North expected, given the fact that slavery had been abolished in Canada, expected that Canada would side with the North. What happened, though, is that the British Empire and England, and therefore all its colonies, declared neutrality. Canada said we're not going to pick a side between the democratically elected government of Abraham Lincoln and a secessionist, illegal slave holding rebellion. So what that meant is Canada became a haven, quite a legal haven. So the Confederate soldiers, terrorists, bomb makers, raiders and moneymen came to Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton and St. Catharines and could operate quite openly. They gave interviews and speeches and they were seen as heroes in in the newspapers because Canada was neutral.

FALEN JOHNSON: Oh, well, isn't that a great choice for Canada? Let's be neutral about slavery.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Well, you know, not everyone was neutral. Obviously, we had a huge abolitionist movement here. There were already thousands of black people in the country, so it wasn't so clear cut. But more on that after the break. The Civil War started in 1861. It's over by 1865. Canada would be born two years after that, in 1867. But the meetings and the efforts to build the Confederation started in the middle of the American Civil War. So in many ways, you know, Canada was born in the Civil War and in many ways with so many of the elite Canadian class supporting the South, we had blood on our hands.

JULIAN SHER: Canada was a divided country from the beginning, where some people supported Lincoln and many elites supported the the slave South. But tens of thousands of ordinary Canadians, especially, of course, black Canadians in southern Ontario, decided to sign up in the Union Army. It's estimated 30,000, maybe 50,000 Canadians fought largely on the Union side. 5000 to 7000 died.

FALEN JOHNSON: But I'm wondering why Canadians would fight in the American Civil War and especially Black Canadians. Like why if you had escaped slavery, would you want to go back and fight?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah. Doctor Cooper explained to me that many black people here felt a sense of duty, because many of them still had family in America, and they wanted to do their part to end the enslavement for everyone else.

DR. AFUA COOPER: They had this desire... I have to go back and play my role. I have to go back and fight in this war of liberation was not emancipation, only it was a war of liberation. I have to do my part. I have to slay the many headed monster that is slavery. So it was an honour for them. They wanted to bring about emancipation and liberation for their brethren. And we know at least 3000 blacks from the Canadian provinces went to fight for the Union Army.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: So as some people here go to fight in the war there and try to support the continuing liberation of people in enslavement, some Confederate elites began to make their way up here, up to Canada.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. And other than neutrality of Canada, why were Confederate soldiers and southerners coming up to Canada? Why were they coming here?

JULIAN SHER: You have to understand also the viciousness of that. The war in the South, right? Cities were being burned. Life was miserable. So for the rich aristocrats, it was much nicer to hang out in the fancy hotels of Toronto and Montreal. And as hostilities grow, you start seeing terror actions that originate from Canada.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Julian told me that many Confederates, obviously from the south, settled in Toronto and in Saint Catharines and in Niagara. He said that the New York Times actually printed an article about, quote, a pleasant little Confederate society that has grown up all along the Niagara River. Doesn't that sound just magical?

FALEN JOHNSON: That's a nice a nice clip from the tourism board.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Which, by the way, you can still see the mansions and homes, that Confederate generals and politicians built and lived in in the Niagara District, if you, if you really search for them. But there were also Confederates in the Maritimes, many who were well supported there. But, you know, Toronto and Montreal, those were the main hotspots.

JULIAN SHER: Canada had two main cities, Toronto and Montreal, and they were comparable to New York or Chicago. And Queen's Hotel in Toronto on Front Street became an important nest of Confederate spies. It's where Jacob Thompson, the leader of the Confederate spy service, took over a whole bunch of suites. But Montreal, which was even closer to New York, it was just a few hours of a train ride. And then from New York, you could make your way to the south. Montreal became an important nexus. The Confederates would have felt immensely at home in Montreal. The Saint Lawrence Hall was in Old Montreal. People know Montreal. It's right near the Notre-Dame Basilica. That beautiful square in downtown Montreal. The Saint Lawrence Hall was one of the most luxurious hotels in the 19th century, kind of like the Ritz Carlton. It advertised, you know, hot and cold baths. And it had a salon and an orchestra. More importantly, it had telegraphs, machines. So Americans, could get the latest news. And the owner, a man named Henry Horgan, openly boasted, he said, my hotel became a headquarters for the Confederate junta.

FALEN JOHNSON: The headquarters for the Confederates. That's another another great ad. Yeah. I never want to stay at that hotel.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I know, I know.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay, so how did the black people in those areas feel about it? Or did they even know, like, how how overt were the Confederates in these places?

DR. AFUA COOPER: Many slave owners from the South brought their slaves with them into places. They stayed in the best hotels in Toronto and Montreal. Everybody knew who they were. Toronto, Montreal, Saint Catherine's, for example, were crawling with Confederate spies and sympathizers. And they were not they were not hiding. So the black community knew this, in fact, in the in the resort towns of Saint Catherine's, black people who were working at these spots as waiters, as barbers, as cooks, as coachmen, so they knew what was going on.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. So black people knew Confederate spies were all over. What about John Wilkes Booth? Lincoln's murderer? Like, what was he doing up there?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Well, Julian, explain that to me.

JULIAN SHER: So it's the fall of, of 1864. John Wilkes Booth, it's often been called, and don't laugh, the Brad Pitt of North America, right? This guy was was one of the most famous actors. Young, handsome. Everybody knew who he was. And his sympathies were were openly pro south. He he had said things like, this country was made for the white man and the white man only. He hated Lincoln, and any notion of the the liberation of slaves. By 1864, things are looking dark. He begins to have a plot to kidnap Lincoln. He wants to kidnap Lincoln with some of his cohorts. He starts meeting them, and the idea is that if he can kidnap Lincoln, he would force the North to surrender more prisoners, free a lot of the Confederate prisoners, and negotiate so that the South would be able to survive. And he comes to Montreal in October 1864. And one night, just before he leaves, John Wilkes Booth walks in a little inebriated, and he plays pool/billiards with the Quebec billiards champion, a man named Joseph Dion. And this is a conversation, and the night drags on. He makes some remarkable statements, which, after Lincoln's assassination, Joseph Dion makes public. And let me quote the words, the exact words John Wilkes Booth says. He's playing pool in Montreal, having got money there, having gotten some support. And he said it made damn little difference. Head or tail? Abe's contract was nearly up. Whether reelected or not, he would get his goose cooked.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: John Wilkes Booth would leave Montreal and a year later assassinate President Lincoln. He showed up at a play, and while Lincoln was sitting in the balcony box seats with his wife, Booth shot him at close range in the back of the head, and then jumped over the balcony onto the stage and ran off.

JULIAN SHER: He dashes off in the night, and he uses a letter he got in Montreal from agents there to find Confederate agents who could help him in his escape. 12 days later, through this manhunt, he is tracked down in part thanks to this Canadian man, Edward Doherty had joined the Union Army, rises in the ranks, and after the assassination, he's tasked with leading the military regiment that will hunt Booth.

FALEN JOHNSON: And did Edward Doherty find John Wilkes Booth?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Oh, yeah. He found him. And Booth was killed on the spot.

JULIAN SHER: And so imagine you have this Montreal man, Edward Doherty, on the side of the Union Army, who was there witnessing Booth's death. And under his clothing, they find that bank draft signed by the former mayor and bank president from Montreal.

FALEN JOHNSON: That's a lot of Canadian involvement and something that frankly, we you know, we have no business at dealing with this.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I know. Why are we involved? It's wild. And finding John Wilkes Booth was a huge undertaking. But he didn't plan and execute Lincoln's murder alone. He had a lot of coconspirators, and one of his besties fled to Montreal.

JULIAN SHER: So after Lincoln's assassination, one of Booth's accomplices, his close friend John Surratt, flees to Montreal. He originally is at the Saint Lawrence Hall, knowing that that's not a good place now because everybody knows it's a Confederate den. Confederate agents reach out to the Catholic Church openly and say, could you help us hide John Surratt, who is now the most wanted man in North America? Booth is on the run and will be captured and killed, but not John Surratt, his close friend and the man who was going to help him kidnap Lincoln. John Surratt didn't partake in the assassination, but it was a key part of the plot against Lincoln. What does the Catholic Church do? They get a parish priest to hide Surratt in a small town outside of Quebec, and then the Catholic Church in Quebec will write a recommendation letter and help John Surratt get enlisted in the Pope's private army, in Rome, called the Zouaves. So this accomplice makes it to Italy, where eventually he'll be found out, captured, brought back to trial and acquitted. But again, you know, in the role of history, where does the Quebec Catholic Church and the English Catholic Church stand? You know, not on the side of the enslaved people, but on the side of the accused accomplices of Lincoln's assassin?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Surprise! The Catholic Church in the 1800s wasn't great.

FALEN JOHNSON: I know, I'm like, if everyone could see my face through that tape, I'm like. Okay. So they really wanted to remain on the bad side of things, didn't they? Like, you know, doctrine of discovery? Check. Residential schools? Check. You know, siding with Confederates? Also check.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I know it's grim, but it's the truth. And much like the rest of the story, you know, two things can be true. This was the destination at the end of the Underground Railroad and meant freedom for people escaping chattel slavery. And this was the destination for many elite Confederates to hide out and spy and plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

FALEN JOHNSON: Right. But how did so many of us end up not hearing about this side of the story? That's what I'm wondering.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah. I mean, Doctor Cooper did talk about how admitting this side of things played very nicely into the mythmaking that is Canada.

DR. AFUA COOPER: Right after this American Civil War ended. 1865, 1867 was Confederation. With Confederation came this idea about how are you going to build another nation? What are these stories are we going to tell? What are the myths we are going to create? It's almost like they hijacked this story, this discourse, this narrative of the Underground Railroad and politicized it. We were the good guys. The Americans were the bad guys. We we free the slaves. We gave them refuge. The Americans held them there in bondage until they had a bloody civil war. And that just shows our whole barbaric theater world. So it was part of the mythmaking with respect to Canadian identity.

JULIAN SHER: I think this story about the Civil War makes us uncomfortable because we have to realize that, you know, we're not as pure and as good as we thought we were. And, and most importantly, there was a debate during the Civil War. There was choice. There were anti-abolitionist societies. There were huge rallies against slavery. People knew what was right and what was wrong, and people made a choice. I think our history books tend to dampen or muzzle these complexities and the debates, and try to present a very singular notion of our of our history. President Lincoln said at one point, history is not history if it's not the truth. And I think those are words we we have to live by.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: This episode of The Secret Life of Canada was written and produced by me, Leah-Simone Bowen.

FALEN JOHNSON: And me, Falen Johnson, with sound design and editing by Graham MacDonald.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Script editing is by Yvette Nolan, with research assistance by Andrea Eidinger and CBC Archives. Our logo is by Patuo’kn Illustration and Design.

FALEN JOHNSON: For CBC Podcasts, the coordinating producer is Roshini Nair. Kate Evans is the senior producer and the executive producer is Cesil Fernandes. The director of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: You can find us on our socials at The Secret Life of Canada. Show notes and links for this episode are on our website at cbc.ca/secretlife. Remember: Subscribe. Follow the show. We're now on YouTube. Go listen to us there. You can share your thoughts on our Spotify feed as well, or reach out to us by email at secretlifeofcanada@cbc.ca.

FALEN JOHNSON: Thanks for exploring Canada's hidden history with us.

TRANSCRIPT: The Secret Life of Canada, Season 6: Was the plot to assassinate Lincoln hatched in Canada?

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